More Bitter Than Death

by Camilla Grebe

  At night I dream about Stefan again.

  Always Stefan.

  We’re making love in the dark and his cold, wet body is moving energetically on top of mine. I know he belongs to the sea now, that he’s resting in Davy Jones’ locker, but I don’t want to let him go. I want to hold on to him for a little while longer, feel him inside me one last time.

  It feels more potent—stronger, better, and more vivid—than making love with Markus.

  Even though Stefan’s dead.

  So, I’m making love to my dead husband and I’m enjoying it, holding him hard around those bony hips, tasting the saltwater that trickles off his back, over his shoulders, and into my mouth.

  He lies down next to me in bed afterward, with his hand on my stomach. I watch his rib cage rise and fall in the dim light, as if he were actually breathing; I see his black eyes twinkling in the darkness.

  “There,” he says quietly, gently stroking my stomach with his soft, cold hand. “Now the baby is mine too.”

  Just as I’m about to respond to him, I feel hands shaking me, bringing me back to reality. The contours of Stefan’s body suddenly blur, fade away, until there’s just a damp breeze left.

  I realize Markus is waking me up, and suddenly I’m afraid I was talking in my sleep. Maybe I called out Stefan’s name, or maybe something else, something worse.

  “Siri, wake up!”

  I look at him, my current partner, the one I should love properly, the one who deserves and needs my love.

  The bedroom is dark, but the faint yellow sheen from the fireplace in the living room lights up his face. His hair is sticking straight up and I notice that his forehead is beaded with sweat.

  “Siri, she’s gone. Someone took her,” Markus says.

  “Who? What are you talking about? Who’s gone?”

  “Tilda, you know, that little girl who witnessed Susanne’s murder. Someone kidnapped her last night from her dad’s place.”

  Suddenly I’m wide awake. Despite the heat in the cottage, I’m freezing. Something in my abdomen twists into a knot and I feel sick.

  Tilda, that little girl who sat there drawing in the pool of her own mother’s blood, traumatized little Tilda, who had only been able to say that the murderer was a man.

  Kidnapped.

  Excerpt from a letter to social services from the treatment director at Säby Treatment Home

  The client is an 18-year-old boy who has been living here at Säby since he was 14. He has also spent some periods during that time living at home with his family, but that has not gone so well. During the years the client has lived with us, we have done a lot of environmental therapy work with him. For example, the client has been put in charge of tending the kitchen garden, which he has done well. He has also enjoyed various types of creative activities such as drama and art. We have had a little trouble motivating the client academically and have therefore had a hard time assessing his intellectual capacities, but a lot of the staff consider him to be a little slow and think he has a hard time understanding complex instructions. He does best in structured situations working with practical, hands-on tasks. He has also turned out to be very artistically gifted and enjoys drawing and painting.

  During the periods when he was living with his family, there was frequent conflict and occasional fights. We think the client has significant difficulties adjusting to new situations and it is also obvious that he fares best in a calm environment. The client has been very cautious and a little reserved in his relations with his peers here at Säby. He really wants to spend time with his peers and is very happy when they pay attention to him and invite him to participate in their social lives. At the same time it’s clear that he doesn’t really know how to conduct himself with kids his own age. He easily becomes nervous and insecure and can also become aggressive, especially if he misinterprets the intentions of the other teens.

  The time has come to discharge the client from Säby so that he can move back to his hometown. It seems most likely that he will live in his parents’ old home, which he inherited following their deaths. We here at Säby think it is important that the client continue to receive support from social services following his discharge, as we do not consider it likely that he will be able to manage fully on his own. We recommend ongoing contact with the social services office. We also believe that he would benefit from joining the workforce, so we also consider contact with the employment office to be extremely important.

  Peter Runfeldt, treatment director, Säby Treatment Home

  I’m sitting on a stack of dissertations in Vijay’s office, crying, tears streaming down my cheeks.

  Vijay is sitting in his chair, looking concerned. I know what he’s thinking: that it was a mistake for him to ask me to help run the support group, that I’m not strong enough, that I can’t keep my own issues separate from my patients’, that the past has caught up with me at last.

  I had so desperately wanted to prove the opposite, but instead I’m sitting here crying.

  Vijay stuffs some snuff up under his lip, clears his throat, and says, “Well, but it’s not like it’s your fault that someone kidnapped that little girl, is it? You realize that, right?”

  I can’t respond, just shake my head and noisily blow my nose in the big facial tissue he handed me, the one that is turning into a little wet ball.

  “She’s a witness,” he continues, “it even said so in the paper. The murderer probably wants to . . . get her out of the way.”

  I blow my nose again and look at him.

  “It could be anyone,” I say. “Markus says they don’t have any leads. They didn’t find any evidence outside the window. It rained too much, so there weren’t any footprints or anything. Henrik is on the run, so he could have taken her. But he really doesn’t have a motive, since he has an alibi for Susanne’s murder. So why would he kidnap Tilda? He can’t be Susanne’s killer. No matter how you look at it, it just seems that everything has to do with that first murder, Susanne’s murder.”

  Vijay takes another tissue from his desk, scrunches it up into a little ball, and tosses it to me where I’m sitting on the stack on the floor. I catch it and continue.

  “The police are checking out everyone Susanne knew with a fine-toothed comb, talking to all her coworkers, all her relatives. I don’t think they’ve found anything.”

  “It feels like we’re missing something,” Vijay says. “Purely statistically speaking, Susanne’s killer should be someone who was close to her. Most murders are committed by people close to the victim. The nature of the crime also suggests that. She was kicked to death, in the face no less. That is extremely brutal and very personal. That suggests that whoever committed the crime had strong feelings toward her, or maybe I should say against her.”

  I blow my nose again and ask, “So what do you think?”

  Vijay taps his pen on his desk and says, “I think we should start by considering the possible motives.”

  “And?” I prompt.

  “Well, if Kattis’s accusations are true, and Henrik was guilty of domestic violence, there’s good reason to suspect that he actually did do it.”

  “But he was at the bar,” I remind Vijay.

  “So he and his buddies say, yes.”

  I consider this comment for a bit. If Henrik’s alibi doesn’t stand up, if he and his friends are lying . . . That would fit. The brutal, unjustified violence, the hatred. It would fit a culprit like that.

  “But wouldn’t the police have checked out something like that? Whether his alibi held up or not, I mean.”

  “Sure, probably. I’m just trying to think of possible explanations for what might have happened. Then there’s the robbery homicide theory. I just don’t buy that. The modus operandi is totally wrong. Unless drugs were involved. Then we have the dad, Tilda’s biological father, I mean. He may have had some reason to hate Susanne, how would I know? I assume the police have taken a close look at him?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.


  “Of course they have. He’s an obvious suspect.”

  “But Tilda’s father couldn’t have kidnapped her. I mean, she disappeared from his house.”

  “So he says, yes. It’s not unheard-of for a parent who has killed a child to claim that someone kidnapped the child.”

  “Oh, my God . . .”

  Vijay flings his hands up. “I’m sorry, Siri, but that’s how the world is. And the faster we accept it and really understand how these people think and act, the easier it will be to stop them. Anyway, who says she was kidnapped?”

  “Well, but she disappeared through the window, in the middle of the night.”

  Vijay smiles faintly. “Maybe she ran away?”

  “Why would she do that? A five-year-old doesn’t just hightail it out the window in the middle of the night—”

  “Unless—”

  “What?”

  “Unless she wanted to get away from her dad.” Vijay says. “Maybe she was afraid of him for some reason?”

  I contemplate Vijay’s words for a bit. Could that be it? Did Tilda leave her father’s place of her own accord, fleeing out into the cold and dark wearing only her nightgown? I have trouble believing that.

  For a second I consider telling Vijay about Malin but decide it isn’t relevant. After all, Malin was running a marathon that day and the killer was a man. Death is a man, I think.

  Vijay fidgets, pulls his fisherman’s cardigan tighter around his body, leans back in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk, absentmindedly props his sneakers on top of a book on African art.

  He runs his hand over his stubbly chin and suddenly looks sad.

  “Do you think she’s alive?” I ask him.

  “Who knows? If someone wanted to silence her, the police certainly don’t have much time. Time would be critical in that case, extremely critical. Or it could already be too late. If Henrik took her, and if he didn’t actually kill Susanne and is just psychotic or confused, and just thinks Tilda should be with him, then the odds are better.”

  I start crying again: an innocent child abducted, her life in danger. I can’t help it, suddenly I’m thinking about the life growing inside me, the equally innocent child in there, in the darkness, and about how terribly cruel and unpredictable the world can be.

  “There is one thing . . . ,” I begin, “one thing I haven’t mentioned, one thing about me.”

  He just says, “I know,” and smiles his secretive smile. “Perhaps I should say congratulations?”

  “But how did you . . . ?”

  He beams. “Oh, honey. You’re not drinking a drop anymore. You’re usually a real sponge. And Markus is stuck to you like a Band-Aid.” He pauses. “You know, I’m actually really jealous.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes,” he says, and suddenly looks embarrassed, staring down at his cluttered desk. He appears to discover the nice art book under his dirty sneakers. Carefully he lifts his feet, brushes the book off, and then looks at me again.

  “Olle doesn’t want kids. I really do, but he’s so incredibly uptight. He loves everything neat and tidy, doesn’t want any kids turning our lives upside down. That’s what he says, anyway.”

  Vijay suddenly has a look of sadness again, an emotion I’m not used to seeing in him. I realize that he’s opening up to me much more than he has before.

  I tread cautiously. “That’s what he says, but . . . do you think there’s some other reason?”

  Vijay shrugs his shoulders, lights yet another cigarette, and out of the corner of my eye I see his hand trembling a little. “I don’t think . . . ,” he begins.

  “What?”

  He hesitates. Takes a breath and says, “I don’t think he loves me anymore.”

  He looks into my eyes, and his eyes are black and empty. He nods slowly at me.

  “Now you know,” he whispers.

  Even though it’s only two in the afternoon, it’s already almost dark. Swift rivers flow in the gutters, brownish-gray water mixed with the occasional autumn leaf and piece of trash. The river passes my feet and disappears with a slurping sound through the grating.

  Just beyond McDonald’s I spot the sign: Employment Center. So this is where she works.

  Kattis invited me for coffee, and even though I’m aware that I’m getting too close to her, I like her too much and have given up on maintaining the kind of professional distance a therapist and client are supposed to have. So here I am outside her office, coming to have coffee with her, as if that were going to make anything better. I catch myself wondering what Aina would think if she saw us, and suddenly I feel ashamed, because I know she’d have something to say about my behavior, something I probably couldn’t argue against, since she is sometimes right.

  Kattis smiles widely as she opens the door and then embraces me warmly for a long time. “Come in,” she says. “Oh my God, your fingers are like icicles.”

  She brushes a few raindrops off my forehead and laughs again, a little embarrassed this time. I hang my coat on the hook and follow her into the bright office space. The ceiling is high, at least sixteen feet; enormous, muntin windows run along the wall facing St. Eriksgatan. There are about ten men and women around the same age as us sitting at desks that look like they’ve been strewn randomly throughout the open floor plan. A couple of people wave cautiously and I wave back.

  “Wow, this is nice,” I say.

  “It is, isn’t it? It’s an old bicycle factory from the turn of the century. There are fifteen of us who work here now, although everyone isn’t in at the moment. A few of us are out doing site visits and things like that.”

  Kattis leads the way through the large space, over to a little kitchenette all the way over at the right side of the room.

  “I bought some cinnamon rolls,” she says. “I didn’t know what you liked. I hope that’s okay.”

  Suddenly she looks nervous, as if she’s extremely anxious that every little detail should be right today. I nod and sit down in one of the chairs.

  “Cinnamon rolls sound great,” I tell her.

  Then we sit like that for a while, on those white chairs at the white table in the enormous white room. Chatting, eating the cinnamon rolls, giggling a little at Kattis’s story about her former boss.

  “Hey,” she says suddenly, and lays her hand lightly on mine. “I have something for you.” She walks over to the cabinets and reaches for something. “Here, I want you to have this.”

  I look at her, smile a little.

  “Kattis, you didn’t need to do that,” I tell her.

  “Open it!” she says eagerly.

  I look at the beautifully wrapped package sitting in my lap. It’s from a local art gallery called Blås & Knåda. Slowly I pull the black, tarred ribbon, which smells like a wharf in the summer, and open the paper. It’s a little ultramarine ceramic vase, not unlike the one Kattis broke that day at the office when she rushed into the conference room and told us Susanne was dead. I sit there with the vase in my lap for a few seconds, not sure how to respond.

  “Why . . . ?” I begin.

  She holds the palms of her hands up in front of her as if to protest something, to prevent my words with her bare hands.

  “Please, it’s important to me. Can you understand?” Kattis says.

  I nod and look at her. Suddenly she looks so sad, sitting there across from me in her thick, gray hooded sweater. I carefully set the vase on the table in front of me, notice its reflection in the glossy tabletop.

  Then Kattis suddenly looks up, over my left shoulder. She furrows her brow, troubled.

  “What is it?” I ask. I turn around and see a guy in his twenties behind me. He’s wearing worn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. His dark, shoulder-length hair hangs like a curtain over his eyes and he avoids eye contact with me. He’s fiddling with a coin in one hand.

  “Can we talk?” he asks Kattis, his voice deep and hoarse—as if he’d been partying and smoking all night—his eyes still fixed on the ground.

&
nbsp; “Now’s not such a good time, Tobias,” says Kattis. “You’ll have to wait a bit. I have a visitor.”

  “Oh, okay,” he says, but instead of going on his way, he sits down on one of the chairs at the table. An uncomfortable silence takes over. I pick up little sugar crystals that have fallen off the cinnamon rolls, gather them up in my hand and eat them, one by one.